Dir. Naoko Omi
There's a surprising lack of
horror anime in existence. Even in the golden era of straight-to-video anime in
the eighties and nineties, where in most cases it was of higher production
quality than TV series and could get away with more adult content, there was a rare
amount of them only. Now, with these straight-to-video works, OVAs, sorely
missed and needed to be brought back, there's a gap left what can be released.
Films are rarely made already, let alone horror ones. TV series have restrictions
in content, and even those which have shocked Western viewers like
Elfen Lied (2004) were probably
censored on broadcast or showed past midnight. Only hentai could get away with
more horror related content; its already porn, so aside from certain Japanese
laws, you could probably get away with more. Manga is usually where horror thrives,
slowly being dripped into the West in bookstores. As for those rare horror
anime that do exist,
The Curse of Kazuo
Umezu is a truly rare one, which I only discovered the existence of within
a few weeks. It's not even included in the version I've read of
The Anime Encyclopedia by
Helen McCarthy and
Jonathan Clements, which catalogues
every anime ever made from 1917 including all the hentai
tapes. Its existence, once released on video in its home country in 1990,
meeting it myself in a VHS rip probably taken from a Japanese VHS a Western
otaku has acquired and made available, shows how deep the well anime is outside
from what its usually labelled as.
Kazuo Umezu is a well regarded horror manga author. He's apparently
obsessed with red and white stripes, which would make passing a barber's shop
and a candy cane stand bliss for him, and I confess to having yet to read his
work, as most or nearly all of his work is not available in the West at all. This
anime consists of two stories over forty five minutes. The first, a schoolgirl
suspects that the new transfer student is a female vampire, but thanks to videotape
the truth is more horrifying. The second is of a group of schoolgirls going
into a haunted house to their peril. The most distinct aspect of the anime,
bookended by a mysterious thin narrator/crypt keeper who entices us with
morality tales, is the visual look of the anime. Clearly there was an attempt
to replicate the style of Umezu's
manga, black lines heavily used and very grotesque imagery. It shows in the
female characters, if just their eye lashes and eyes, who dominate the entire
anime. I cannot help but think of Western influences such as gothic art to
maybe even dolls with the look of the anime, more so when showing moments of
terror for the characters through excessive use of said black lines. It looks
good in terms of design, and the format allows for more nastier material. The
first story brings in a freakish level of body horror that the cutesy break
between two stories cannot make into a complete joke - think of very, very big
teeth. The second story, lots of raspberry jam smeared everywhere.
In terms of quality in other
areas, it's not a great work if I'm completely honest. It's grown on me, but
this must be stated. The visual look is distinct, but the actual animation is
rudimentary. The obsession with moments where the characters freeze in terror
do go on a bit, and the stories are very predictable. In terms of entertainment
value, it's about the presentation of what's on screen, not originality, that
will be whether you like this anime or not. Interestingly, the stories do
occupy themselves with the ideas of seeing something only to live to regret it,
curiosity killing the cat literally. The first centres around how a video
camera can reveal the truth, pre-empting the obsession with technology's
tangibility in Japanese horror, only for it to reveal too much. The second, cut
into by the narrator, becomes purposely abstract, reality cut to pieces by going
to the wrong place. It even gets a bit dreamlike and also reflective of itself,
the main two characters watching horror movies, including one called the Curse
of Kazuo Umezu, before they end up investigating the haunted house.
It's a completely minor work. The
technical and plotting failings do undermine it. But it's still fascinating, immensely
fascinating. Beginners to anime shouldn't view this first - this is for those
looking for the deepest, obscurest cuts of anime or horror, forgotten in
history and made unique for this and its appearance. Done in the era of hand
drawn animation, it still has a textual quality, despite rudimentary animation,
that stands out far more than the plastic sheen of post-2000s work made on
computers. Almost carnivalesque in its horror - the subversion of body parts
and the body, obsessions with toys - it's encouraging to investigate the
author's original work, and despite the failings of it, it has stayed on my
mind since seeing it. The rarity of horror anime helps it, but it's a strange
beast by itself, its forty five minutes memorable. A layer of eeriness trickles
throughout it, emphasised by the likelihood the version I saw was an original
Japanese videotape release from 1990, having survived to reappear in some form
for someone from a different country, me, to find. Myths, legends, eroticism,
body horror, historical and cultural information, even Western and Eastern pop
culture seeps throughout a great deal of anime and its animation plates alongside
the genres within it. They feel far more rooted in deeper and more interesting influences
than a lot of Western animation, where even a minor work like The Curse of Kazuo Umezu has something
incredibly distinct despite its predictabilities. And since horror anime is
rare, its great to see one that brings something interesting with it instead of
fail miserably.
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